


The Blood-Dimmed Tide

by chr1711



Category: Original Work
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-17
Updated: 2018-01-17
Packaged: 2019-03-06 01:11:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,357
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13400265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chr1711/pseuds/chr1711





	1. Portland

THE BLOOD-DIMMED TIDE

What lives in the wind and frightens animals?  
And what does not fear the dark, for it lives there?

Part 1.  
Portland, Dorset, UK

Devon watched as the shadows lengthened across East Weare on the Isle of Portland. The sea was a boiling mass of animal life, and more joined it, scurrying, flickering, cascading out of the rocks and tumbling down the cliffs. Devon’s skin itched, maddeningly, as it had for days now - he was too far from the drugs he took to keep the itching under control, and his face hurt fiendishly. He had tidied the hut a dozen times that day, he knew it was obsessive but what could he do? He was unable to stay in the island’s hotels and guest houses because the owners invariably thought he was some kind of junkie afflicted with kleptomania and OCD. Not true, although OCD manifested for him in a continuous flow of linkages and wild associations through his mind if he did not attempt to quieten it. Devon had taken this wild hut above what was once a railway cutting, a place where climbers delighted in mastering rocky outcrops and finger-crushing cracks hundreds of feet above the all too solid ground.  
Away to his left the harbour lights pulsed somnolently above a sea that was as green-grey as a battleship and itself pullulating as every creature in the sea tried to kill every other creature.  
Darwin, he thought. Darwin’s real offence to the Church wasn’t Evolution - most religious scholars appreciated that the Biblical Creation was shorthand for ‘we don’t know what happened but here’s a story’, but what really rolled their stones was the notion that Nature rather than being harmonious and ordered by the Divine, was a battleground with all of the natural world trying to kill the rest of it or avoid being killed. And so what we see out there, Devon thought, is just the natural progression thereof. This morning he’d seen two rabbits - sorry, bunnies, he thought. Underground mutton. He wasn’t sure if it was even unlucky to think the ‘r’ word around here, but the ill-luck surely had arrived - he’d seen two of them corner a squirrel among the stones of the Cove and tear it to pieces. He was utterly used to birds pecking one another to death and once again, knew it already happened even before the Change. Mad-eyed sparrows chirped as they attacked starlings. The whales screamed bizarre songs that equated to ‘come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough’ and chomped down on the previously-friendly harbour seals that in turn went for their eyes. The bunnies / underground mutton / whatever had fought to the death in their burrows, that undermined the cliffs and made the superstition regarding them quite understandable. The survivors emerged bloodied and set off to find other things to kill.  
Even the insects were at it, and the ground heaved with their war at times.

Life was a battleground anyway. Back in London there was a particular stretch of road near his home where drivers regularly screeched incomprehensible abuse at him, people reached for weapons, and would occasionally walk close behind him, pushing at him, making uppity Devon get out of the way for them. He was used to it; so used that when actual attack happened and he ended up in A&E it was with a sense of mute resignation. He had been there so often; times when the fists and feet came suddenly, times when he went home in a taxi, half-screaming with pain, and did anyone help? Of course not. Few people help women, but nobody at all helps men. On that occasion he’d gone to A and E in the morning, on his own and never trusted his neighbours again. Nor did he go out for a very long time; the physical injuries healed within months but the psychological injuries never quite left, leading him here in this wild hut on Portland, that weird chunk of rock flung into the sea off Dorset and which had fascinated him for years.

At night over his stretch of the Portland coast, where there are stars, and gnarled stunted trees point accusing fingers at them he can hear screaming, thin and distant, quite probably from the Young Offenders Institute not far away; but older inhabitants have other ideas. Eric, interviewed in the Lobster Pot pub:  
Howls of the dead, young womble, he says. Souls of the civil dead screaming their way across the velvet sky, down Cow Lane …  
What, says Devon. Hold it right there.  
Cow Lane? Says Eric, looking significantly at his near-empty glass. Devon chuckles and goes to the bar.  
Would’a told ‘ee anyway, says Eric. Cow Lane. Road as links the world of the living and the world of the dead. Means summat to thee, do it?  
Cow Lane, says Devon. It was the old name of a street near my flats. The last orts of a field system around there.  
Orts, said Eric’s friend Orrin. We used to ‘ave orts. Herds of ‘em. You don’t see ‘em nowadays. And he went back to his pint.

The trying to get a free pint is blatant but Devon figures the local man is pleased to have an off-islander take an interest in local matters, one that doesn’t revolve around barn conversions and property prices. He’s right; Eric has lived with these tales since boyhood and has never uttered the word ‘rabbit’ to himself or in company. Bunnies undermine the cliffs, see. Bring it all down on you, they will. If anything he knows he underestimates the weirdness of the Island. The Portland stone, prized worldwide, means that the isle does literally change shape and contour over time as new workings are built and old ones abandoned. It is a different place to the one Eric remembers from his boyhood in the 1950s and ‘60s, and not just sociologically. He thinks he recalls sturdy dwarfs, ancient figures shawled and caped (both men and women; they made little distinction between male and female clothing), little more than four feet tall for the most part and many afflicted with the Portland Neck, the goitre hanging below the chin the sign of lifelong iodine deficiency from living a hard life on the Island.  
That nobody else remembers this, and he suspects his nan (who may well have told him the story) was confusing Portland with the eastern Pyrenees, where a dwarf race called the golluts (from goll, the goitre) survived into the mid 20th century, their last survivor shot dead as he walked home in the village of Pardines in 1980. Who’s to say that Nan never set sail from San Sebastian and came north, where (or so she believed) the people were rich, clean, well-behaved and happy? Certainly nan would stand at Portland Bill and intone quiet words in a language that sounded like Spanish at times, at others Italian. Nan was herself of no mean stature but a lifelong defender of the small and undersized, whether they be dog, cat, or human. Her own childhood, then, had been passed in those same mountain villages, around the end of the 19th century and at some point she had travelled, but never spoke of it except to remember the dwarfs.  
Nobody’s ever found any bones though, Eric says darkly. Somehow the conversation has got onto those dwarfs, the Spanish (or rather Catalan) ones. Never dug one of the dwarfs up to see what made her small.  
So what are you saying, Devon asks. That they didn’t exist? Or at least not that recently.  
Existed all right, Eric says. We have the photographs.  
He reaches into his disreputable tweed jacket. Orrin mutters about surprise that his friend actually possesses a wallet. But Eric, instead of taking out money for the next round of beers, draws out a photograph. It shows a small man leaning on a car, a small convertible. The goitre is plainly visible beneath his chin, and he is dressed in what looks like a baggy poncho and a disreputable cone-shaped hat. It is by a roadside somewhere, with a low brick building in the background, an indefinable horizon, that could be the Pyrenees or could be Dorset for that matter. When Devon went to the Pyrenees he was young - late teens - and largely out of it, but he remembers long curving roads, half-derelict houses of deep sadness, and a high, eternal sky.  
Taken in the ‘30s, Eric says. Last of the Golluts.  
Devon inspects it. A slow feeling of cold and distance crawling over him like a beam-descended spider.  
The more so when his knowledge of cars begins to click into place.  
That isn’t the 1930s vintage it purports to be. It’s a Japanese retro-sports model that has only been in production since around the year 2000.  
Staged, says Devon. Just because there aren’t any golluts any more doesn’t mean there aren’t any people of restricted growth. I saw one today in Weston. Leaning on a wall looking the worse for wear, poor guy. And that’s what you have here. A recent photograph of a modern car and a dwarf in costume. Which may even be the same man I saw earlier.  
If you say so, says Eric, and puts the picture away again.  
Orts, says Orrin. Orts and crossbones. Been to the graveyard, young womble?  
Hope to avoid it long as I can, says Devon. No but, the pirate graveyard, I have. Very atmospheric.  
At night, says Orrin.  
No, says Devon. Night is for being inside.  
Hmph, says Orrin.  
I’m night-blind,says Devon. If that’ll suit you better. It’s true, but the real reason is the terror; and besides, he has looked up at the stars and heard the screaming, and he would so much rather do that from the relative safety of his hut or a flat or house or hotel room, than being outside where he could be picked off like an outsize mouse or vole. The culling of Nature that has gone on for several days now suggests that Outside is not a good place to be; and indeed here, in this pub with its cheerful landlord and staff and its friendly black and white dog, would seem a far better bet. 

If you were to die on Portland, he wonders, would you be reborn below the cliffs and off Pulpit Rock, dragged onto the rocky shoreline beneath the light of the Portland Bill lighthouse? Would you, in fact, rather contemplate your eventual death on the Isle than life anywhere else?

Eric isn’t just a pub fixture and winder-up of townies. He is the creator of Jennings Bloody Jennings, the archetypal schoolboy revenge story in which Jennings goes on a rampage to wipe out his tormentors. You’ll never look at a cricket stump the same way again. It’s been described as “‘We need to talk about Kevin’ where Kevin is the good guy.” and “A gender-flipped ‘I Spit on Your Grave’.”

Something plops into Devon’s beer. Oh god, he thinks, a spider, a big one; but no, it scrabbles out and scurries away. A mouse. A moment later there is a terrified squeaking from the floor somewhere.

In the light of the car park lamps a thousand eyes glow yellow, staring at the pub, staring hungrily at its inhabitants. They have been waiting long years, waiting underground. They started this fight and now they are intent to finish it.

The wheels on the bus come off as it plunges down West Cliff, its radiator invaded by psychotic underground mutton attempting to open the can and get at the inhabitants.

Grindwallow’s seminal track “Vomit into my Ruined Skull” is best viewed as their homage to Swans - just enough for Michael Gira not to sue them. Robbie Ox’s band have been refining their style lately and moving away from the thunkish NuMetal of their early years towards experimental soundscapes and notes so low only elephants can hear them. Ox himself made a few comments that were misunderstood in the present SJW-heavy climate regarding ‘ganstas whose only contact with real gangsters was at the movies’ and ‘when white musicians take a look in the mirror and realise they aren’t black and should stop trying to be.’


	2. 1002 - A Monastic Jolly

Eric is also rather more ambitiously the author of 1002 - a Monastic Jolly, a.k.a. Arson Planet which involves a post-millennial (the first millennium) panic, a captive creature that eats time and is held responsible for the bubonic plague, and the question of whether Jesus broke wind. (this is a fascinating theological question and occupies roughly a third of the book). The rest of it is taken up with feral boys and the shrieking of the ever-nearing Centipede Goddess Maa-xa-quahuitl in her quest to rescue her child (the captive chronovore). It is set in the medieval city of Arson in south-eastern France. The horizon is smoking, whether because of the attempt to burn out the Plague or because William the Arsonist does that kind of thing, believing fire to be a thing of true beauty and God’s plan for the world. His rainbow covenant has promised us, says William, that we shall not die by water. He did not speak of fire. (consider Vlad the Impaler only with burnings instead).

There were something like 20,000 stakes on the hills around Arson and each one was in constant use. Flames licked and billows of greasy smoke arose into the unbesmirched blue sky. [there is no historical evidence for this. Burning down of rebellious towns or that failed to pay their tithes, or just looked at him funny, yes. Mass burnings at the stake that would have depopulated entire regions given the population of the day, no. William avoided bloodshed in captured cities because it would only make him more enemies. But it’s a great story and the backdrop for 1002.]

Arson, n. Named after the medieval state of Arson, near present-day Lyon in the Rhone-Alpes region of France. Renowned for its aggressive politics especially under King Guillaume I, known as ‘William the Arsonist’ (1341-1406) and its habit of burning captured, enemy or just plain rival cities to the ground. Eventually Arson and its capital (of the same name) succumbed to the obvious fate. The eventual culprit was found to be William’s sons Richard and Bertrand, the latter was Bishop of Arson at the time and known to posterity as ‘the Burning Bishop.’ Its name survives in the Villa Arson in Nice, a prestigious educational establishment for the arts. Richard was known as ‘Richard the Mad’ which given the era and its unhinged personalities was quite an achievement.

In 1002 the protagonist is Jerome of Querne, personal physician to Prince Richard, who is incarcerated (his words) in the monastery that forms part of the citadel of Arson. He has as his right hand man a youth called only the Boy.* The Abbot is monstrously slain one night and a protean creature appears in the Abbot’s rooms, removing the sense of time of anyone who comes close to it: for them everything becomes simultaneous. On the hills around Arson smoke and flames rise constantly. Jerome refers to it as “Arson Planet” with the implication that, cut off from the Earth, it is a traveller through time and space, all will be revealed…  
Then the Wild Boys start arriving (on their way back from the fire, presumably).   
The Doctor, er, Jerome establishes that the Chronovore upsets people’s sense of Time as an unconscious defence mechanism and that it is a very young creature waiting for the return of its Mother. And when Mummy is on her way the trouble starts … (has anyone investigated the matter in DW of alien creatures leaving their young lying around all over the place - littering with their litter as it were?)  
Prince Richard’s motto is Les Jolies Flammes. He is generally referred to as Richard the Mad, which considering his father believes in burning anyone and anything that looks at him funny and his brother the Bishop is a flat-out arsonist who does it for giggles, may tell you something.

It is likely that the Boy does not in fact have a name, or that he had one when he was younger and since abandoned it. Like the wolves he admires - and whose traits the Wild Boys share (is he in fact a Wild boy of Aveyron?) - he can be given a name, or none at all.

We can imagine a scene where the King tells Jerome that his sons burn people for fun but he doesn’t.

Not only is Jerome basically the Doctor, King Guillaume is more or less Kurtz. And Judge Holden. And Baron von Ungern-Sternberg. And Vlad the Inhaler.

“We’ve invented the guillotine by mistake!” and a severed head goes roly-poly down the hillside. (let’s do the timeslip again…)

“My lord Bishop Bertrand of Arson is not to be permitted to return to the cathedral of Sant Pau del Feliu as upon his last visit he started a fire which consumed the nave, choir and psaltery. He was seen grinning broadly and roasting his chestnuts on an open fire.”  
Letter from the Archbishop of Urgell to his bishops, 1380s.

“Peasants roasting on an open fire,  
Small flames licking at their toes. 

3,651….  
3,652…  
3.653 …

 

10.999…  
11,000…  
11,001…

One of the few female characters is fated to go through life as a key victim of nominative determinism: hanging around the Abbey and indulging in occasional rumpy-pumpy, her name is Abishag (it’s in the Bible). Jerome notes that her name means ‘the cause of wandering,’ cf. his belief that Arson has become cut adrift from the world and is spindrifting its way through the stars.

Bertrand is also seen doing Jerome up the fundament, accompanied by two of his stalwart henchmen, an act which he hopes will make Jerome feel ‘less of a man’. This backfires; Jerome is simply angry about having been attacked and assaulted in his own lodgings and declares war on Bishop Bertrand. How, Jerome asks, am I ‘less of a man’ because two thugs held me down while a third had his way with me? The fault is with them, not with myself.

*****  
While nobody would think to tell Mr McCarthy what he should or should not write, injecting a certain amount of WSB into his slack ol’ writerly veins might be no bad thing.   
We were in the town of Huarache in a low-down disgusting bar owned by a man called Don Isidro del Nariz, because he did not in fact have a nose this being one of the side effects of snorting the powerful ground-up coca leaves of the area. Two swollen holes allowed ingress for the air into his nasal passages and lungs. An unfortunate side effect was near-continuous infection.   
Que pasa, said Isidro.  
No idea, said Glanton, which phrase is both Spanish and English. We have taken many scalps and lay them at the feet of your miserable town.  
Carajo, said Isidro thickly, if that is your idea of reasonable discourse you can hightail it out of here by nightfall. Still, the scalps and all.  
The slow bell of the Iglesia de Nuestra Senora de las Lamentaciones began to toll, sonorous and dark, as it had in centuries past when it was brought by the foul-smelling conquistadores from a church in Granada, over land to the port of Cadiz and thence westward. Ever westward. To fetch up here, at the smoky candle-end of its days until that fire which scoureth all shall come and light it in flame one last time and all else be a rain of bloody ash and burnt-out trees and empty houses and the ghostly crying of abandoned babies on a seashore itself intoxicated with the slow, deadly crawling of the winter sky.  
In a back room of the low-down disgusting bar the Judge was adjusting his nice fancy new white suit. Behind him on a steel-framed bed a boy lay in a thoroughly horrifying state. I wondered at the disappearances that had plagued the western and south-western states for years and if you could map the Judge’s travels onto them. But the Judge, it appeared, had even less taste for random killing than does the fox in the henhouse. One here, one there, where they would not be accounted for.


	3. Chapter 3

II  
The part about the killings (as opposed to what, exactly? The other bits aren’t The Magic Roundabout by any means)

Isidro del Sanchez, aged 20. Captured and forcefed several bottles of Brewdog High Insanity overnight then found dismembered and scuttled on a used sheep lot on the west side of town.

Yanty ‘Bang-bang’ Headmuncher, aged 33. Found on a waste dump with clear signs of having been given a Header in the top of the cranium.

Clairo ‘blustering grass’ Glange, aged 25. Discovered by dogs in the village of Muchopoche and also in the villages of Glanto, Queequog, and Blinge.

Darwin Otto, aged 43. Porcupine head i.e. nails hammered into the skull, also violated by all imaginable ports. 

 

Garguantua Punty-Nickel, aged 32. Disembowelled and left for the dogs to peck at, he was also found on the town dump in Glanto (mostly). Several attributes removed before death.

Father Portly McBride, 48. Wrapped in plastic sheeting and set alight in the town square of Mapunuche some time before dawn.

Russell Harty-Gland, 53. Filled up with battery acid orally and then set alight and rolled down hill to the strains of “My Old Man Said Swallow a Clam” played on an accordion between 3.12 and 3.16 a.m.

Eusebio Nangk, 22. Castrated with wire-cutting shears while crucified with barbed wire on the door of a disused fuelling shed. Bled out or got some help on his way.

Bernard ‘Bunty’ Okoloshe, 37. Hit with a non-existent steamroller from the Acme Products inventory. Coroner was unable to determine species for some time.

Ildefonoso Rawcane, 40-ish. Orificially penetrated with a succession of surrealist objects and left in several pieces on the proverbial garbage dump. Autopsy suggested the dismembered parts had been forcibly penetrated.

Estatorio Natweazle, 31. Cranially redecorated with a rifle butt, described as ‘not so much cranial insult more a sustained campaign of expert-level trolling to the head.’

Nutley ‘Nutter’ O’McNulty, 47 (?). Disjointed like a chicken then inadvertently guillotined with a large segmented disc.

And others as follows, all found dead in various places with unmistakable signs of having been forcibly killed:

(a list of roughly 1,000 names followed at this point and has been removed for reasons of sanity)


	4. Foddy

Foddy lived in the locked shipping container. He had been there for several months attended only by the one he knew as Big Ears. Big Ears brought him simple food and water. When the door to the shipping container was slid up, Foddy could see distant hills and ochre plains rolling as far as his eyes could see - but these sights dazzled him, his eyes used to the darkness in the container.  
Dark is not bad, Big Ears told him. Seeds grow in darkness. The night is dark but at night you can see all the light of the Universe.  
If Foddy screams - as he did often, at first - Big Ears screams back at him more loudly.   
Weight loss going well then, Big Ears says. It is true - Foddy is now interestingly skin and bone, an epigraph of youth.  
What is bad is easy to endure, Big Ears says, crouching in half dark, one ear lit by the fitful light from the grilles in the side of the container without which Foddy would have suffocated by now. What is good is easy to get. It remains to be seen which this is.   
Foddy has no words for this; he recognises shards of Epicurean philosophy like the slivers of human brain embedded in a handed shark swimming in a fish tank, year after year. Pink Foddy. Language is a virus from outer space. At night Foddy can not in fact see all the light of the Universe unless he stands on his pot and peers out through the grate. At night however Big Ears may be there. One night he stirs and says,  
I was not asleep. I was watching you breathing.

If all forms of communication are non-Epicurean (dammit we need a word for this! Taraxic perhaps. Taraxic masculinity. And femininity) then all forms of communication are ended. After all in a world where an imbecilic orange-skinned fatberg whose name is schoolboy slang for breaking wind can be elected President mainly on false news, anything can happen, or can it? Will we know if it has?  
Foddy now has two large ears branded on his shoulder blades: Property Of Big Ears, it implies. He feels rather like Dumbo, if only he could fly.

 

Big Ears took Foddy on the back of his little car, naked except for his hat with bells, and does it by the back. Foddy creaks like an animal. Tears flow through his face.  
Squeaks like a pig, which he says Big Ears.  
And Foddy starts creaking even louder.  
Although Big Ears has most of its physical relationships with farmyard animals before the age of twelve, it is greatly revived by Foddy's squeaks and gets even more energetic.

Big Ears and his three identical brothers  
A day with Foddy in the container, Big Ears drives him to a distant city he knows very well. It goes through a hardware store to buy a hole saw.  
Foddy staring at the gate, he watches in horror as Big Ears meets three other figures in the parking lot as big and florid as he is, and although he is a little different, identical to himself Big Ears.  
Big Ears comes back to the cabin and opens the door. He and the others enter, heavy feet on the floor.  
My brothers, he says. These are called Big Butt, Big Foot and the other is called for a reason that will be obvious. There's another one called Big Head but he's gone in the forest for many years.


End file.
